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Monday, July 25, 2011

Essential Skill for SLPs: Saving Images from the Web

This past Thursday, I had the privilege of doing a fly-by at Mindwing Concepts day-long workshop, Narrative and Expository Writing with the Story Grammar Marker® in order to cover a few tech complements to their great tools, including the Mindwing Blog that I help to write. During my presentation I talked about Popplet, which is a terrific tool for concept mapping and breaking down expository text. In the course of that demo, I showed how to add an image to a Popplet, and I promised the audience that I would re-post those steps here today. Saving and using an image from the Web is a multistep process that can be confusing to people, but it is an EXTREMELY useful one to become proficient in, coming into play anytime an SLP would like to create a PowerPoint or other presentation, make articulation cards, or construct visuals using engaging and relevant images. Here is how you do it, for Mac and PC:

1. Look up an image you would like to save (and use in a web app such as Popplet) using Google.
2. Click on Images in the left sidebar.

3. Click on the image you would like to save. This brings you to a preview page where you see the image in large format superimposed over the page where it actually "lives" on the Web. Click on "Full Size Image" on the right sidebar.

How stereotypically Irish of me to have chosen this topic.

4. This shows the image "by itself" on the page. This is a useful page to have navigated to, because it is the easiest way to save it as a full-size, high quality image. Also, it shows you the actual URL (web address) of the image. This is helpful because some web tools (not Popplet, but Glogster and Google Docs) let you insert an image via the URL. While on this page you should:

a. copy the URL (tell ya why in a second)

b. Control-click on the image (Right-click on a PC). This brings up a drop-down menu, with one of the choices being Save Image As...* Choose that, and pay attention to where you save it (I often save to the desktop and trash it when I am done)

5. Now you have a saved image. You can insert this into a document on your computer, or upload it to your web creation (e.g. Popplet). You should site the image, according to guidelines for Fair Use and copyright in Education, by pasting the URL somewhere in your creation.

*There was a good question from the audience: Can't we just select Copy Image from that drop down? The answer is yes IF you are using a program that is "local" to your computer (e.g. Word, PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote, etc), and then you can Paste it. The answer is NO if you are using a web app such as Popplet or Glogster, which makes sense when you think about it. We can't click-drag or copy-paste a file onto a web page except with certain tools that allow you to do that (e.g. Google Docs). Instead, we need to upload the file.

I hope this was helpful! This skill is going to be one that I cover, along with my compadres Amy O'Neill and Laura Goehner (both CCC-SLP) as we present this session at ASHA in San Diego in November:

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